(Yicai Global) Sept. 22 -- China rivals the world in artificial intelligence, but still faces shortcomings in systems and theory, online news outlet The Paper quoted Yao Qizhi, the first Asian winner of the Turing award, as saying.

Yao is one of the founders of modern cryptography and dean of Tsinghua University's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences. He recently appeared in a television variety showed called Ji Zhi Guo Ren, or "The Wisest Man."

"Algorithms, data and computing ability have developed to an incredible extent," Yao said. "It is the right time to combine the ability to handle Big Data with algorithms originating in deep learning in order to break the AI bottleneck and apply it to more fields, such as financial technology and medical diagnosis."

"China's artificial intelligence can basically rival the world's, but the dividends brought by industrial revolutions over the past 10 years will eventually be gone," he said, adding that shortcomings still exist. "The first is systems. We have made progress in hardware and have supercomputers, but computer systems are still our weakness. The second problem is theory. The theory of AI is widely known and has achieved great things in our global academic circle, but China still has a long way to go.

"If we want to develop in computer science, we need to work on systems and theory."

Yao stepped into a completely new field, computational economics, which studies game auction theory, a few years ago. "I used to study many fields and write two or three important papers before moving on to another one. This is the kind of scientific research I enjoy." He is currently studying artificial intelligence.

Yao is looking forward to the future of AI. "Artificial intelligence will have remarkable influence over scientific and industrial circles in twenty or thirty years. I hope China can gain some original and patented results in the next round of industry development," he added.